Thursday, 27 December 2012

To this day I still ask my friends to stand in front of my camera for a portrait that will render present the past as it evolves from now to yesterday. This portrait I have found in my files and it brings back the unruly days spent mostly by night in San Francisco, the cave on Fulton Street, where many of us met and drank and talked into the wee hours discussing the beginning and the end of the world.
Our worlds were many and different. Serge came from Aix-en-Provence and had a wild though well controlled streak in him. Loved salsa and Spanish and lived among Brazilians down Mission way.
And then of course there came a time to split, to get back on the saddle and head on down or up the sunset to where our next station in destiny dictated. Serge ended up in Havana in the early nineties and some of us moved away to Paris, to Cali, to God-Knows-Where, and lost touch with each other. Us, who thought full of illusion that our nights and verb were indestructible. Not such luck.
In short, this portrait is to pay homage to the passage of time and to friends we met, photographed and lost, amid the endless rumour of our daily lives. Amen.